This cartoon presents Henry Blair, a former U.S. senator from New
Hampshire, as the white elephant of the Republican administration of
President Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893). After Blair failed to win
reelection to the Senate earlier in 1891, President Harrison appointed
him as the U.S. minister to China. The Chinese government,
however, rejected Blair as persona non grata (an unacceptable
diplomatic representative) because of his Senate voting record in
support of prohibiting Chinese immigration to the United States.
Therefore, the cartoonist portrays Blair as a white elephant: an
unwanted possession the owner or keeper (here, the Harrison
administration) has difficulty getting rid of because no one else wants
it. He carries a sign on his trunk reading:
"Wanted: An Office." The (gray) elephant is also the symbol of the Republican
Party.

Henry William Blair was born in 1834 in Campton, New Hampshire, to
schoolteacher parents, but was raised by a neighboring farm family after
his father died when the boy was two years old. As a youth, his
education was sporadic, but he read law from 1856 to 1859, passing the
state bar in the latter year. In 1860, he was named the
prosecuting attorney for Grafton County, New Hampshire. During the
Civil War, Blair was elected captain of the 15th New Hampshire Volunteers,
and soon rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. A severe battle
wound at the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, (May-July 1863) forced his
retirement from the military. He returned home to
convalesce.

In 1866, Blair was elected as a
Republican to the state assembly, and to the state senate the following
year. In 1874, he won the first of two consecutive terms in the
U.S. House of Representatives (1875-1879). He did not seek
reelection in 1878, but was selected by the state legislature in June
1879 to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, and reelected in 1885.
Blair gained a reputation as one of the Senate's busiest members, who,
according to Harper's Weekly "introduced more
bills, and ... occupied with speeches, reports, and preambles more
pages of the official record than any other Senator."

Besides supporting mainstream
Republican policies like high tariffs, the gold standard, and generous
pensions for Union war veterans, Blair was an ardent reformer who backed
causes such as temperance, the rights of labor, federal aid to
education, and women's suffrage. He repeatedly introduced a bill
to ban the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages
(to take effect in 1900), and in 1888 published a lengthy book on the
subject, The Temperance Movement; or, The Conflict between Man and
Alcohol. As chairman of the Senate Education and Labor
Committee, he held hearings in the mid-1880s on the relationship between
business and labor, even-handedly soliciting the views of both labor and
business representatives. As a result, he drafted legislation to
establish a federal bureau of labor statistics. It was Blair's
support of labor that led him to sponsor legislation closing America's
borders to immigrant Chinese workers.

Blair was most well known for
his sponsorship of the Blair Education Bill. Motivated by concern
for the plight of the former slaves in the South, the senator proposed
that $77 million in federal funds for public schools be distributed to
the states, proportionate to their illiteracy rates (which were much
higher in the South), over several years. The bill passed the
Republican-controlled Senate three times during the 1880s, but the
Democratic House speakers never allowed the bill to come up for a vote
in the lower chamber. Opponents were able to chip away at the
support by arguing that the South was progressing toward general
literacy, and in 1890 the bill failed in the Senate.

With Blair's defeat for
reelection in 1891, President Harrison first offered him a federal
judgeship, which he declined, and then, in March, the ministership to
China, which he accepted. His senate colleagues swiftly ratified
the appointment, which, according to Harper's Weekly, some
Washington wags interpreted as his fellow senators being "glad to assist in getting Colonel Blair as
far as possible from Capitol Hill." After China's strenuous
protest, Blair tendered his resignation as minister, which the president
accepted on October 6, 1891. Thereafter, he practiced law in
Washington, D.C., until his death in 1920 at the age of 85.

The major piece of federal
legislation against Chinese immigrants was the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882. The law banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the
United States for a period of ten years. It broke with the American tradition of open
immigration and was the first federal law aimed at restricting a
specifically named ethnic group. The Scott Act of 1888 permanently banned the immigration or return of Chinese
laborers to the United States. The bill passed the House unanimously and met only slight
resistance in the Senate (for legislatively undermining diplomatic
negotiations). Mass demonstrations in California celebrated the new law.
About 20,000 Chinese who had left the U.S. temporarily for China were
refused reentry (including about 600 who were already traveling to
America when the legislation was enacted). The Supreme Court upheld the
Scott Act. The Chinese government, however, refused to recognize its
legitimacy.

The Geary Act of 1892 extended
for another decade all of the laws related to Chinese immigration. It
established an internal passport system for all Chinese residents in the
United States, by requiring them to apply for and carry a certificate of
residence. If found without their certificate, they would be subject to
deportation or imprisonment for a year of hard labor. Furthermore, bail
was denied to Chinese involved in habeas corpus proceedings, and Chinese
witnesses were prohibited from appearing in court. Chinese Americans and
the Chinese government denounced the law. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the Geary Act in 1893.